5 Ways to Experience Flickr on Your Mac

Whether you’re a photographer, designer, writer or any other creative sort, you’ve probably either uploaded images to Flickr, downloaded images from Flickr, or both. It’s easily the most ubiquitous photo sharing site on the planet.

Today we’re going to take a quick look at some awesome desktop apps that will let you search, view and download Flickr images on your Mac.

We’ll start with one of the strongest Flickr Mac clients to date. Flickery gives you an interface that you should certainly be familiar with; it looks almost exactly like iPhoto.

Considering that the Flickr website isn’t exactly the most user-friendly place on the web, this is actually a breath of fresh air. Here browsing, searching, sharing and downloading photos is an intuitive process that feels just like it should. You can manage galleries and groups, tag images and more.

While Flickery is all about translating the entire Flickr experience to a desktop client, Viewfinder is much more focused on the downloading aspect. If you’ve ever tried to search and download 50-100 photos from Flickr you know that the multi-step process can take forever.

With Viewfinder, this process is streamlined so that you can quickly search through the entire Flickr library using filters like Creative Commons and Commercial Use images. You can then choose your minimum size, download immediately and copy the attribution snippet to your clipboard. The price tag may seem a bit high but if you regularly download lots of images the long way, it’s well worth it. Check out our full review here.

If you’re looking for a more affordable alternative to Flickery, Flicker1 is a good start. The interface is quite similar, though a bit less refined, but more importantly you can snag it for less than two bucks!

Flicker1 is definitely geared towards users who have Flickr accounts and are looking for a decent way to manage them from a desktop client. You can view your stats, individual photo information, add notes and tags, etc.

Downloadr is another utility that’s not so much for account management as it is for users looking for a fast way to download lots of photos. You can browse explore, check out a user’s photo stream and search/download creative commons content.

It’s not quite the fully-featured bulk downloader that Viewfinder is, but the dark interface is pretty slick and it’s roughly a fifth of the cost. If you’re on a limited budget, you should definitely check it out.

If you’re not managing your Flickr account or downloading hundreds of photos for blog posts, you’re probably browsing for some solid desktop photographs. An attractive desktop makes all the difference for us visually-minded folks and Flickr simply can’t be beat for its selection and variety.

Flickr Wallpaper simplifies the process of grabbing images from Flickr and setting them to your desktop. It will even allow you to set up an interval for your wallpaper to automatically change. If you get bored easily and are always changing your desktop image, this is the perfect way to get your fix with fresh daily images. Almost all of the other solutions above have a quick option for setting an image to your desktop but they don’t have the auto-changing features found in Flickr Wallpaper.

Price: $5.99

Flickr Wallpaper

Conclusion

The five apps above should help almost all Flickr junkies experience the service in a desktop app environment. If you’re looking to manage your account, check out Flickery and Flickr1, if you want a bulk downloader, try Viewfinder or Downloader and if you just want some great desktop images, download Flickr Wallpaper.

Leave a comment below and let us know how you use Flickr on your Mac. What’s your favorite native Flickr app?